Jemina, The Mountain Girl

A Wild Thing

It was night in the mountains of Kentucky. Wild hills rose on all
sides. Swift mountain streams flowed rapidly up and down the
mountains.

Jemima Tantrum was down at the stream, brewing whiskey at the family
still.

She was a typical mountain girl.

Her feet were bare. Her hands, large and powerful, hung down below her
knees. Her face showed the ravages of work. Although but sixteen, she
had for over a dozen years been supporting her aged pappy and mappy by
brewing mountain whiskey. From time to time she would pause in her
task, and, filling a dipper full of the pure, invigorating liquid,
would drain it off--then pursue her work with renewed vigor.

She would place the rye in the vat, thresh it out with her feet and,
in twenty minutes, the completed product would be turned out.

A sudden cry made her pause in the act of draining a dipper and look
up.

"Hello," said a voice. It came from a man clad in hunting boots
reaching to his neck, who had emerged.

"Can you tell me the way to the Tantrums' cabin?"

"Are you uns from the settlements down thar?"

She pointed her hand down to the bottom of the hill, where Louisville
lay. She had never been there; but once, before she was born, her
great-grandfather, old Gore Tantrum, had gone into the settlements in
the company of two marshals, and had never come back. So the Tantrums
from generation to generation, had learned to dread civilization.

The man was amused. He laughed a light tinkling laugh, the laugh of a
Philadelphian. Something in the ring of it thrilled her. She drank off
another dipper of whiskey.

"Where is Mr. Tantrum, little girl?" he asked, not without kindness.

She raised her foot and pointed her big toe toward the woods. "Thar in
the cabing behind those thar pines. Old Tantrum air my old man."

The man from the settlements thanked her and strode off. He was fairly
vibrant with youth and personality. As he walked along he whistled and
sang and turned handsprings and flapjacks, breathing in the fresh,
cool air of the mountains.

The air around the still was like wine.

Jemina Tantrum watched him entranced. No one like him had ever come
into her life before.

She sat down on the grass and counted her toes. She counted eleven.
She had learned arithmetic in the mountain school.